In data transfer systems, data is transferred from a sender to a receiver via a medium. The effectiveness of a data transfer is impacted by data errors caused by various factors. For example, data read from a disk is susceptible to errors caused by media defects and thermal asperities which may result in burst errors. As data is moved between the storage media and the auxiliary storage device, the data is transmitted over a read channel. Media defects and thermal asperities are transient electrical events, usually associated with a particle, and normally resulting in misreading data in a portion of a sector. Absent accurate detection of these errors the effectiveness of data transmission is reduced. A burst error is a number of errors adjacent to each other. Burst errors happen relatively frequently in the transmission of data and are defined as long or short burst. Long burst errors are easy to detect because of the existence of strong signatures. In order to detect and correct data errors, including long burst errors, a data detection and decoding may be performed. Oftentimes it may be desirable to perform multiple data detection and decoding iterations on a data set in order to enhance the chance of converging on a corrected data set. The number of data detection and decoding iterations may vary depending on the data set.
In contrast, short burst errors are difficult to detect in a data detection and decoding because of lack of signatures. This difficulty in detection of short burst errors is common to all coding practices. For example, the failure to detect the short burst errors using low-density parity-checking encoders and decoders may result in these errors being magnified at the output of the detector and decoder.